For my SHS1 Oral Communication classes, I wanted to know which of the most
useful words in English may or may not have been covered by students during
their junior high EFL classes. To do this I compared, on the one hand, a vocabulary
list I made out of all the Ministry approved JHS textbooks and, on the other,
the GSL's
list of the top 1500 high-frequency words, and then found out which words were
common to both lists. Finally, after lopping off grammar
(function) words such as "a. in, about, however", adding
a simple Japanese gloss and including each word's GSL's frequency rating if
available (if not, the word was marked "JHS only"), I came up with
a list of 1000 or so words I could work from when creating teaching materials.

Note that the file is large (300Kb) and opens up on a separate browser-page
(rather than in the frame). And please, if you decide to use it, do let
me know -- it's always nice to hear I'm not alone in Japanese secondary-school
land. Anyway, here's the list.

For info about vocabulary learning software, here is a very worthwhile
article by Michael Geffon.